John Zurier »the mountain the cloud and the springs«

The title of this show is "the mountain the cloud and the springs". It comes from Ingmar Bergman’s "Fanny and Alexander". Four hours into the film, Uncle Isak, played by Erland Josephson, delivers this line in a remarkable story he tells the children he has just rescued from their evil stepfather’s house. It evokes a place both mythic and real.

The paintings and watercolors in this show also reflect my looking at and thinking about the landscape paintings of Lars Hertervig and Carl Fredrik Hill. I have made paintings under their influence before, but for this show I am thinking of it as more of a dedication to the beauty of their painting and to the twin poles of rough-hewn matter and dematerialized light.

– John Zurier, September 2024

John Zurier was born in 1956 in Santa Monica, California and lives and works in Berkeley, California and Reykjavik, Iceland.

Noteworthy recent exhibitions venues include Stavanger Art Museum; The National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik; Gagosian, London (all 2023); UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2022, 2018, and 2014); Moderna Museet Malmö, Malmö (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe (2016); Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine (2015). He has also exhibited at the 30th São Paulo Biennial (2012); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, CA (2010); 7th Gwangju Biennial (2008); and the Whitney Biennial (2002).In 2010 he was awarded the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

His work can be found in numerous public collections including the UC Berkeley, Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fine Art Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and others. A catalogue surveying his work from 1981 to 2014 with an essay by Robert Storr was published in 2015.